Notes on the Geography of China: Guangzhou: Shamian: Photo 35

Tourists need coffee, as well as air conditioning. Here they have both, in the old Yokohama Specie Bank building. It's a different world from the one Harold Acton saw in the 1930s. He wrote, "I stayed in an old-fashioned hotel on the Shameen, a small island separated from Canton by a narrow creek, surrounded by barbed wire in case of anti-foreign riots. The intense humidity aggravated the heat, which I counteracted by carrying small towels about with me. Moss and mosquitoes thrived. Cigarettes, matches, book-bindings--everything was sodden. (Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948, p. 295)